Game talk

My commentary on MyMiniLife seems to have prompted a few responses on blogs. The question at hand, basically, is whether the virtual world of the future will be an immersive 3d environment which includes web content on surfaces within the world, or whether it will be new capabilities for the Web, displaying worlds within web browsers.

I think it’s safe to say that the former is more the classic view of the Metaverse — more like Snow Crash, more like the vision that folks like Linden Lab are working towards. Indeed, with acquisitions like Windward Mark, we see Linden continuing to emphasize their vision of being an immersive simulation environment. They’re not alone; over at Delzo’s Avatarian, we see this case being made:

Read More “Web in world or world in web?”

Over at TechCrunch there’s an article about MyMiniLife. In a nutshell, it’s a competitor to CyWorld or Habbo, with social network aspects and virtual apartments. The client runs in Flash, so you can embed it inside any site: your MySpace profile, Yahoo!, whatever. The look of it is very Sims-like. You use virtual currency to purchase stuff to decorate your house with. It’s put together by a bunch of students who seem to have gotten together at U Illinois Urbana Champaign, though now one of them is a grad student at UCLA. And they’ve been around since the middle of last year, running along quite quietly.

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Ho hum. Another day, another major toy brand creates a virtual world. This time it’s Barbie’s nemesis, the Bratz doll.

In the meantime, BarbieGirls.com, which is Barbie’s own take on this space, has registered a half million kids already. That’s since April 26th.

There’s a part 3 coming eventually as well.

F13.net – Usefully Cynical Commentary » GDC07 – Raphing It Up #2

f13.net: Well, you’ve gone for a lot of user customizability as opposed to full-on genesis, full user creation.

Raph: Well, yeah, I’ve always… even if you go back through old GDC sessions. There was the one with the big inflammatory statement where I told the movie guy “Get over yourself, the rest of the world is coming!” But part of that was saying that the rest of the world is coming, but they’ll be working with Legos instead of with atoms. So, you can extrapolate from there. Nothing there is something new that I’m saying, I’ve been saying similar things for a while.

Part one is back here.

The march of worlds outside the gamespace continues:

Timeless Cities just landed $1m in funding. No word on what exactly it is.

I got pointed to FakeTown today, which I had seen before but not in a while. I dig the map view, but couldn’t find anyone else.

Plain old avatars are also booming — Voki is a new system for this which seems to have some similarities to Sitepal.